The assignment tsunami

The first reaction of a person getting through IIT is "Yahooo (maybe google will be better) I have reached the top of the world...."..well herein lies the problem ....when u reach the top of the world from one side of the world, the momentum takes you down through the other side. This,in short,tells you the life of an IITian (atleast as far as Mtech goes). Well my story is no different. I can't forget the day when the results were declared and to my pleasant surprise I got through ( I had already started preparing for next year's exam). Well that is how I reached the top of the world.

Now comes the interesting part-the sliding down part. Once in IIT I made this grand plan of playing one sport each day, seeing 2 movies a day, go out sight seeing mumbai each weekend. 2 weeks later, I still didn't know the nearest bus stop to our IIT campus, already submitted one assignment, screwed up a quiz and knew each corner of the our department lab like the back of my hand. Now that will give you an idea of how much I executed my grand plans.

One of the things that I hated most when I was in Infosys was the night outs that I had to spent inorder to meet the deadlines. There have been times when I had to sit till 6 am in the morning to complete the work. When I resigned Infosys, one of the things I was happy about was that now there will be no more night outs!!!!. But what do I see when I reach IITB. There are practically ONLY night outs. The day before the assignment submission, the lab is filled with our class. Even people with laptops are forced to come to the lab since there is no internet connectivity in the room after 12 am ( How cool is that :( ).

Till around September beginning, life was ok-ok. Though work was there, it was manageable. I could watch around 1 movie per day. The real attack started soon after the month of September started. Beginning of 1st week of September my workload read 0 assignments to do, no quizzes, 3 movies pending to watch. By end of 2nd week of September my scorecard was 5 assignments to do,1 quiz to prepare for, 2 movies pending. By end of 3rd week of September 2 assignments done, 3 more to submit the next day, screwed up the quiz, ended up facing a surprise quiz in another course and deep and creative thinking (read sleeping) during class hours. O yeah 2 movies still pending.

The most irritating of all the courses is the software lab. We need to break our heads on mundane assignments like Latex, HTML,Ruby, Ruby on Rails (Now which egghead can think of such a stupid name for a such a stupid application). Sorry for all these technical junks, couldn't help it. It was just last week that we had submitted our assignment for Ruby on Rails (ROR). The damn thing was soo confusing that my hair count have reduced to half due to the constant plucking of my hair each time I go mad trying to make sense of what was happening in this goddamn application.

Since ROR had become such a headache, we guys had no choice but to cooperate among ourselves to finish it off. Some guys will do one set of problem whereas others will try out the remaining. If in the very highly unlikely case that the puzzle(ie, the task) was cracked, it was time to rejoice for all. Our motto was :- One for all and all for one. In between we had some interesting conversations

Me : Alpha charlie come in, alpha charlie come in

Adil : Alpha charlie over, alpha charlie over

Me : Alpha charlie, what's your position, what's your position

Adil : solider down, soldier down

Me : Alpha Charlie, hold on to your positions, we must not give up.

Adil : I have given up. Contact beta charlie. Mei tho jaa raha hu sone ke liye.

Thus goes each day in the life of a new Mtech student. Life is hectic, definitely, but I guess it's worth it. After all IIT is IIT. :).